


An Unscripted Conversation

by E_Salvatore



Series: Nobody Needs to Know [2]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Technically canon-compliant, as in 'you can't prove this didn't happen', missing scene from 203
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 17:05:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6059190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore/pseuds/E_Salvatore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Come on, I'm taking you for lunch."</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Unscripted Conversation

“This connection between Thomas Warren and my father is unsettling, given what we know of their deaths,” Strand cautiously lowers his voice at that, and he’s vague enough that it takes her exhausted mind a while to connect the dots: Howard Strand died in 1998. So did Thomas Warren, according to Strand himself.

“I’m guessing there’s no way you’ll write it off as a coincidence?” Alex asks, tugging on his arm to pull him into the café of her choice. The hostess greets them with a smile as her eyes light up with recognition. It’s an old haunt of theirs, a brisk ten-minute walk from the studio. They used to meet here all the time.

It’s been more than four months since the last time she set foot in this place.

Strand shows no visible reaction at returning here after all these months. He follows her to their usual booth and slides in without a single comment, as if he has no memory at all of that last tense, awkward dinner they’d shared here the night before their disastrous phone call. It probably doesn’t bother him. It shouldn’t bother her either.

“I’m having Ruby go over my father’s things. He left a lot of material, so it’ll be a while before we can tell if that particular paper is still where it should-”

 _Unhinged_. The word flashes in her mind in bright red, all-caps as she observes Strand. His eyes are bloodshot, his hands are shaking, his motions are jerky and his speech is frantic.

She wants to reach out, to still his hands with her own. But there are lines now, boundaries and chasms between them that cannot be crossed.

 _We shouldn’t anymore_ , he’d said to her a month ago in Chicago.

 _We shouldn’t anymore_ , Alex reminds herself a dozen times for every five minutes she spends in his presence.

“Richard,” She calls softly, busying her fingers with the hem of her sweater to keep herself from doing anything stupid. “I know this is important but can we please just… take a break? You have Ruby looking for the paper, you’ve got all of our interns working on this. Let them handle this for now, okay? You need to step back for a minute.”

That gives Strand pause, but not for the reason she expected. “You’re not recording.” He finally says, forehead creased with confusion.

“What?”

“You called me-”

“Yeah,” Alex cuts him off, feeling oddly flustered under the lens of his microscopic gaze. Did he think she was going to record this? That she would be shooting questions at him in between bites of lunch?

Is she _supposed_ to? Is it still okay for them to have lunch without it being work-related?

Strand clears his throat. “Are you ready to order?”

She nods; it’s a little too forceful, a little too relieved. A waitress comes by to take their orders and tells them how nice it is to see them again, asks them where they’ve been and how everything’s going. The woman eyes Strand’s new look with disdain, shakes her head at the bags under their eyes and tuts at the way Alex’s sweater hangs off her frame, all while rattling off their usual order and double-checking that their preferences remain unchanged. She pokes at Alex’s shoulder after jotting down their order, muttering one last comment about it being too sharp for hugs as she walks away.

Alex shrugs it off and plasters on a tight-lipped smile, trying to downplay what just happened. “She’s worse than my mom.”

Her smile falters when she catches sight of the stricken look on Strand’s face as he studies her in a whole new light. She feels uncomfortably self-conscious when his eyes linger on her collarbone; he’s undoubtedly noticed the sharp outline of it straining against her skin.

His eyes cloud over with either sympathy or empathy; it disturbs her that she can’t tell which it is. “Alex-”

“Don’t.” She doesn’t mean to snap but she can’t do this right now, can’t put up with Strand’s questions and concern now that he’s suddenly bothered to take a close enough look to see all the cracks in her façade.

“But you look-”

Alex sighs. “I know. So do you.”

Well. He can’t argue with that.

Strand trains his eyes on the passers-by visible through the window next to them, and she busies herself with her phone, coordinating with Nic back at the studio and setting up a meeting with the housekeeper, Maddie. The café is slowly filling up but it feels like the silence between them has taken on a tangible form, a bubble that muffles the happy chatter and carefree laughter of the other patrons and amplifies her occasional sighs and his aborted attempts at conversation.

The fourth time he opens his mouth as if to say something, their waitress comes bustling over with a plate in each hand. Thankfully, the lunch crowd has trickled in and she rushes off before she can make another comment on Alex’s appearance.

Lunch may have been her idea but it was mostly for Strand’s sake – or so Alex thought. It isn’t until her food is right in front of her that she realizes just how hungry she is. She hasn’t been able to stomach much these past few days, so it was really only a matter of time until her appetite returned.

She refuses to entertain the notion that her renewed appetite has anything to do with Strand’s presence, with knowing that he’s alive and safe and here with her.

They eat in companionable silence, slipping back into their usual ways. If she ignores the heaviness of her eyelids and the crazed glint in Strand’s eyes, Alex can almost pretend it’s six months ago and they’re discussing a case over lunch, making plans to hit the road after this and check out some leads. She can almost pretend, but she makes a conscious effort not to. Daydreams are all fun and games until you wake up from them.

With work off-limits for now (and she’s slowly starting to regret making that request of him), Alex struggles to break the ice between them and get a conversation going. In the month since her visit to Chicago, they’ve only shared a dozen or so work-related phone calls. No more emails accompanied by the header _I thought you’d find this interesting (please note that it has been debunked)_ , no more typical-Strand text messages, no more hastily scrawled notes left on the nightstand, telling her he’s left for the airport but checkout’s at twelve and she should get some more sleep.

Work is safe. Work isn’t one of the hundred little things they can never speak of again. But work is also slowly driving Strand to the brink and if he’s content to push it to the back of his mind for the remainder of their lunch, there’s no way she’s going to bring it up just to ease the awkward tension between them.

 _This is nice_ , she thinks of saying. _How’s your food?_ would probably be a safe bet. _Sometimes I wonder if I’d have less trouble sleeping if you were still around_ , she admits to herself and promptly banishes that thought to the darkest corner of her mind, never to see the light of day ever again.

_Do you ever miss the way we-_

Strand yawns.

“I’m sorry,” He says, offering her a strained smile. “I guess I-”

“You need to get some sleep.” Alex states with a frown, pushing aside her almost-empty plate.

“So do you,” Strand counters, echoing her words from earlier.

Alex shakes her head. “I’m fine,” She tells him dismissively; hopefully, that new trick one of the interns suggested – the one that involves using lipstick to hide dark circles – works well enough to cover up her lie.

He used to be able to see right through her and her layers of concealer. _I lived with a writer and a teenage daughter, Alex. I can tell when a woman tries to hide her exhaustion with make-up,_ he’d remind her whenever she lied to him about getting enough sleep, determined not to let him know that she’d stayed up all night, plagued by visions of tall shadows and upside-down faces.

“Really - I’m fine.” Alex insists.

And he believes her.

“If you say so.” He follows her lead and pushes aside his plate. “Are you ready to go back to the studio?”

“Actually,” Alex catches the eye of a waiter – an unfamiliar face, this time – and signals for the check. “I have somewhere else to be. I’m meeting with this girl, she’s a housekeeper for-”

“Maddie. Yes.” Strand frowns. “Nic filled me in while we were waiting for you. Don’t you think that’s a waste of your time? It’s probably just another Rebecca Yi situation.”

Alex beats back the urge to roll her eyes. Of course Strand would think the Hochman case isn’t worth investigating. She suspects that as far as he’s concerned, nothing other than his case is worth investigating right now. “Yeah, well, I’d rather know for sure. Besides, I doubt Nic told you everything. How can you be so sure that it’s nothing?”

The waiter brings over their check and Strand waves off Alex’s attempt to retrieve her wallet. She’d forgotten how stubborn he can be about this. _Old-fashioned_ , he’d corrected her once. _Outdated,_ she’d teasingly retorted.

“Look, now that your show is getting more popular, you need to take that into consideration whenever you start a new investigation.” Strand reasons. “And in this particular instance, I think there are too many similarities between the two new cases for them to be anything other than an elaborate cry for attention.”

“You’re really good at thinking the worst of people, did you know that?” Alex huffs, irrationally irritated by Strand being his usual self. She knows she’s taking it personally, that it has nothing to do with the fact that these are _her_ cases and not theirs or his, that it has everything to do with Strand simply being reasonable and pointing out something worth taking note of.  But knowing that doesn’t keep her from snapping at him.

The walk back to the studio is completely silent. Alex leaves Strand at the main entrance and tosses a quick “see you later” over her shoulder as she heads across the street to get her car.

“Wait,” A hand catches hers, long fingers easily encircling her wrist. After all the effort she’s put into respecting his personal space and re-establishing boundaries between them, she finds herself bristling at Strand’s negligence to extend her the same courtesy. “You’re _still_ going? Alex, I told you: it’s bound to be a waste of your time. You’re better off staying here with me to-”

“To what?” She wrenches her hand away and finally allows herself a moment of uncensored, unrestrained truth. “To help you with _your_ case? I get that it’s important to you and you think that my case is just a hoax or something but damn it, Richard! You can’t just show up after a _month_ and expect me to drop everything to help you. It’s bad enough that you’ve commandeered my entire office and you tried to get Nic and Paul to break the law – which we are _definitely_ going to talk about; what the hell is _wrong_ with you?”

“I didn’t mean to-”

“No, you _did_ mean to. You come hurtling in like some sort of hurricane and you don’t think twice about yanking everyone into this mess and that’s – it’s not fine but I _get it_ , okay? I get that this is important to you and it’s tearing you apart.” Alex sighs, running a hand through her hair as she tries to compose herself. Screaming at Strand isn’t going to do either of them any good. “I’m trying to put myself in your shoes and I’m trying to help you.” She says softly. “Isn’t that enough? That needs to be enough, Richard. You can’t ask me to set aside the show and put my job on the line.”

Strand blinks. His shoulders tense, but the fight drains out of him within seconds. A hand reaches out for hers, but he abruptly retracts it and stuffs both hands into his pockets, as if he finally understands that his touch is unwelcome.

“I need to get going,” Alex tells him. “You should stay. Feel free to use my office until it’s time for you to check into the hotel. Just… try not to pull anyone else into this mess. They have actual jobs they need to do.”

She waits for Strand to nod before she turns away and heads for her car, slipping in without another word. As she drives away, she sees two figures in her rear-view mirror. Alex blinks, and then there’s only Strand, staring after her for a few more seconds before he enters the building to fall deeper into the Thomas Warren conspiracy and further away from her.

That’s fine.

The show must go on, with or without Strand to hold her hand every step of the way and reassure her that none of this is real.

Besides, she’s gotten pretty good at convincing herself that the shadow in the corner of her eye is just a figment of her sleep-deprived imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> We all know it was only a matter of time before one of us wrote the missing lunch scene. I'm sorry it had to be me and I'm sorry I had to throw in 500% more angst than I had any right to.
> 
> Also: yeah, this is a series now because I'm having way too much fun exploring the aftermath of Strand and Alex sort-of, kind-of breaking up.


End file.
